Sujet proposé pour un début de contrat en octobre 2015 Directeur

Sujet proposé pour un début de contrat en octobre 2015
TITRE du SUJET : Modelling of the strike-slip earthquake mechanism with multiple friction laws
Directeur (trice) :
BHAT SURESH, Harsha, CR, [email protected]
Co-directeur (trice) / Co-encadrant(e) :
KLINGER, Yann, DR, [email protected]
ROUGIER, Esteban, Los Alamos National Laboratories, USA,
[email protected]
Equipe d’accueil : IPGP- Equipe de Tectonique et Mecanique de la lithosphere
– UMR7154
Financement :
Contrat doctoral avec mission
Plus de renseignement voir : http://ed560.ipgp.fr, Rubrique : Offres_de_thèse
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The earthquake hazard assessment has been required for the safety of large facilities such
as nuclear plant or urban development. One is, therefore, expected to develop a useful and
reliable computational earthquake modeling tool that can combine detailed information from
local geology, rock physics, hydrology and earthquake source physics for the quantitative
earthquake hazard assessment. In this project, we focus on the strike-slip earthquake
modeling to explore the fault behavior under the condition of the complex fault geometry
and complex constitutive behavior of the rocks hosting them. Hence we aim to extend the
existing fracture simulation algorithm, MUNROU, to account for (a) multiple friction laws
consisting of the laboratory-derived laws: Rate and State friction, Flash heating and slipweakening (b) Complex fault geometry (c) Anelastic constitutive behavior of the fractured
medium surrounding the faults. This would the first attempt in earthquake source physics to
combine the above three behaviors so that a realistic assessment of seismic hazard can de
done.
This project will be done in the collaboration between Dr. Esteban Rougier (LANL) and Drs.
Harsha S. Bhat and Yann Klinger (IPGP) to explore the earthquake rupture mechanism.
Each advisor brings in a unique set of skills to the project. Dr Rougier is the developer of the
FDEM code and has a lot of experience in modelling brittle failure. Dr. Bhat is a theoretical
mechanician focusing on earthquake physics and rock physics. Dr. Klinger is a
neotectonicist who will provide valuable insights on complex fault geometry and local
geology.
We formulate a hypothesis that the accurate modelling of the earthquake rupture could be
achieved by properly modelling the fault geometry, friction behaviour and inelastic nature of
off-fault damage. While some of the complexities have been explored separately, no study
has tried to integrate all of them due to lack of appropriate tools. The results would be
benchmarked against the 1992 Landers Earthquake due to the high quality and variety of
observational data available.
We propose to address the project by subdivided our tasks into the following three working
packages.
WP #1: Extending the LANL code MUNROU to handle strike-slip earthquake ruptures
WP #2: Modelling the 1992 Landers earthquake rupture
WP #3: Hydro-Mechanical coupled analysis for the earthquake cycle